Last night couple of the guys came down to do some DSO imaging at Clayton and I was in two minds as to whether I should do some DSO imaging or planetary. I decided I would wait until dark and just test the seeing before making up my mind. The predictors had all seemed to indicate that seeing would not be that great, so I decided that a wait and see approach was going to work best.
At around 9pm after cooling the C14 I slewed to Sirius and what I saw shocked me. The seeing was that good that I saw solid diffraction rings from a solid star that was Sirius. I could detect little if any movement and I called out to the guys to come and take a look, first through the diagonal then straight through via cranning ones neck; all at around 488x The straight through view was spectacular and I wondered what the night would hold. Mars was still too low and Saturn had not even risen.
When Mars did rise high enough we were treated to a lovely visual of Syrtis Major and the pole and tine little dark regions near the pole. I quickly setup to capture some data after waiting a short while from the first viewing. Mars was still being blocked by the slide of roof of the observatory and the light from Mars was only hitting half the mirror. There was some wind and this was making Mars wobble a little, not bad seeing but not like I had seen a while ago higher up in the sky. Overall seeing on Mars never got much better than 7/10. However it is very low still and I was happy
with this result.
Saturn on the other hand climbed higher out of the soup and presented a real show. Visually the live feed was still but the scope was being buffeted by wind. There are storms present in the NEB and there is a dark spot on the border of the NEB and where the Dragon storm was last year. In the red channel you can see the octagon shape belt at the pole. This was a nice night of quality seeing.
Click here for the Saturn image at the site.
Edit, this is the last run on Mars for the night. It turned out to be better than expected.
Click here for image